BY PURE coincidence, Australian football's first official match on foreign soil was played at the Hickam air force field in Honolulu overlooking Pearl Harbour, the scene of a far more sinister invasion that still resonates at dawn services today.

It was October 1963 and the exhibition match pitted Geelong - winner of the VFL Grand Final a fortnight earlier - against the powerhouse club of the era, Melbourne.

A second game was scheduled for San Francisco six days later. The venture was part end-of-season trip, part promotion of Australian football.

The happy-go-lucky Cats were still very much immersed in the afterglow of their sixth flag, arriving in Hawaii with a sore arm from their innoculations and the hint of a sore head from their premiership festivities.

"Melbourne was in Honolulu training every day for a week before us," Geelong forward Colin Rice says. "We were still celebrating."

Melbourne rover Hassa Mann suggested the Demons were still feeling the sting of having lost that year's preliminary final by nine points to Hawthorn.

"Norm Smith being coach meant that he was always determined to get the best out of the players, no matter when or where we played," Mann recalls.

"Firstly because he was a very proud man, and secondly because whenever we pulled on a Melbourne jumper it was emphasised to us what it meant to represent the club.

The first match was played on a small and irregular-shaped ground on the air base, which took in an American football pitch and part of a baseball diamond. Rice said the goalposts were "tucked away in each corner", while Cats captain Fred Wooller concedes that the ground "was a bit rugged".

"You'd get tackled and thrown down on to this red scoria baseball diamond," Rice says. "People were coming off with a bit of bark missing. It's a bit different to now. They play on carpet, they don't even get their boots muddy."

HawaiiSource:Supplied

HawaiiSource:Supplied

All pictures courtesy of Bob Gartland.

The umpire was Harry Beitzel, who four years later would be the driving force behind an Australian team nicknamed "the Galahs" going overseas to play Gaelic football against teams in Dublin, London and New York.

The Demons won the Honolulu match by two goals, but the real competition between the two clubs was just heating up.

Melbourne secretary Jim Cardwell had noticed that the Cats' blazers and kit were branded with the words "Geelong Football Club: Introducing Australian Rules Football to the U.S.A" and he was not impressed.

"Geelong were keen to be known as the first Australian team into North America and had their gear made up to indicate as much," Mann says.

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"But there was a bit of skulduggery from the Melbourne end, and we managed to arrive a day or so before them. That in turn transcended into a bit of ill feeling between the clubs, and the San Francisco match ended up being a very heated affair. There was some pushing and shoving between officials while the game was going on."

The match was played in the open parkland at Golden Gate Park, promoted on radio and with fliers on car screen windows which spruiked "Aussie Rules Football: Thrilling ... Exciting ... Spectacular."

Much to the chagrin of both teams, the ground measurements were somehow lost in translation, resulting in a playing surface about a third bigger than the MCG. "We got there and we thought 'Gawd, have a look at the size of this ground'," Wooller says.

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Mann agrees: "The oval they'd marked out was the biggest ground I've ever played on, particularly a few weeks after the season when you weren't especially at your fittest."

Rice says the two clubs had always enjoyed a cordial relationship: "On New Years Day we used to have an annual picnic at Bacchus Marsh, a sporting carnival with a Footballers' Gift and a tennis tournament, then a few barrels and a barbecue".

But all of that had become strained by the race to set foot on mainland America.

Wooller said he did not think the players were "overly effused but there ended up being a bit of biffo, some people running onto the ground. It was a bit of a spillover, a few trainers, a few officials."

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Rice says that "at one stage a couple of officials even ended up throwing cameras at each other behind the goals".

Wooller said the crowd of about 4000 loved the drama: "And with the publicity the game got on the news that night if we'd played a match the following week we would have got 30 or 40 thousand people there."

Melbourne triumphed again, this time by five points, and Rice says several of the players smoothed the waters in the changing rooms afterwards with the help of several stubbies of export-labelled Melbourne beer.

"After we stopped punching each other around we got together and it was very social," he says.

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The exhibition matches out of the way, the players got on with enjoying their holiday. Forward pocket John Sharrock, who was 19 at the time, recalls: "I went over 12-and-a-half stone and came back 13-and-a-half stone."

It was not caused by home-cooked meals.

"A busload went on to Los Angeles and a busload of us went to Lake Tahoe," Sharrock said. "We ended up with free tickets and front-row seats for Sammy Davis Jr and Liza Minelli shows."

Mike WilliamsonSource:HWT Image Library

Wooller, who was employed by Bowl-O-Matic at the time, headed to Los Angles with Polly Farmer to look at how the various tenpin bowling alleys operated. Both men and their wives then flew to Las Vegas to rejoin the touring party.

He describes the trip as "an experience and a half". "The great majority of us were from the country and for all of the boys it would have been our first trip overseas," Wooller says. "Some of them wouldn't have ever been in an aeroplane."

Sharrock agrees: "I was in my first year and ended up with a premiership and a trip to America and I thought how easy is this?"

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None of the Geelong trio could imagine there being a time when home-and-way matches would be played outside Victoria, let alone beyond Australian shores. To them, the bus trip from Kardinia Park to play St Kilda was an inconvenience.

But Mann, who would later become a Melbourne director and then chief executive at a time when the league changed its name to the AFL, says he was not surprised about seeing the Saints hosting an official game in New Zealand today: "I think in the dim, dim distance the VFL always had hopes that the game would one day be played outside Australia," he says.